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Monday, November 14, 2011

I’ve been over here in Sweden for two weeks today, and we are still waiting for winter to join us.Luckily the smart Swedish ski experts saved snow from last season that we have been able to ski on. Much like our very own Frozen Thunder in Canmore but large scale, here in Ostersund they buried an Ikea-sized mound of snow under sawdust last season. Slowly unveiling this pile a truckload at a time and turning it into a highly coveted ski track makes each day exciting as we hope for a few more hundred metres of snow to explore on our skis.

In the media over here they call it white gold, and that’s an accurate description of the pile of well kept snow that can only be found here. There aren’t many places in Europe to ski right now unless you want to do it in a ski tunnel.That being said we did get a race in this past weekend, luckily the stars aligned for the small town of Brucksvallarna, and they pulled off one mens race and one womens race. We raced 10km skate on a 2.5 km manmade loop, but at this point we will take what we can get! It was awesome to put a bib on and ski as hard as I could, after putting the hours in all summer and fall I just want to race. The snow crew here in Ostersund doing their thing, making skiers happy.

One day last week Chandra and I ventured out on rollerskis- which is something we hadn’t done in a long time, but we needed a break from what was then a 2km long saw-dusty loop with a little pavement and snow mixed in. The rollerski was actually amazing, we went out at 3:30 (sunset around these parts!) and explored all kinds of new terrain on our two wheeled skis.

From here we don’t really know what’s next. My plan had been to travel up to Rovaneimi, Finland (the home of Santa Clause) today and to do some races this coming weekend, but those too have been cancelled, and we are now taking things day by day. One thing is almost for sure, I will race next weekend, but at this juncture I’m just not sure where that will be.